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Infamous Milgram experiments repeated: Only a few will stand up against authority

The Milgram Experiment. Image Wikimedia.

The chilling Milgram experiments have been replicated, and yet again, 9 out of 10 are willing to inflict electric shocks and pain on another person. In these infamous experiments the power of a white lab coat was enough to get more than half the participants (26 out of 40) to deliver a fatal shock (the participants didn’t realize the shock was faked, and the victim an actor).

This willingness to obey authority is both a great strength of humanity when authority is worthy and yet leads to the darkest abyss when it is not.

By nature, we are largely empathetic creatures: most people really don’t want to cause pain, they get quite upset themselves in the process. Yet many people will override this inbuilt ethical wiring if a person in a position of authority insist they do. It’s time we talked about ways to train people to resist. There is hope as outlined below in a different study from last year.

Conducting the Milgram experiment in Poland, psychologists show people still obey

Press Release: The title is direct, “Would you deliver an electric shock in 2015?” and the answer, according to the results of this replication study, is yes. Social psychologists from SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Poland replicated a modern version of the Milgram experiment and found results similar to studies conducted 50 years earlier.The research appears in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

“Our objective was to examine how high a level of obedience we would encounter among residents of Poland,” write the authors. “It should be emphasized that tests in the Milgram paradigm have never been conducted in Central Europe. The unique history of the countries in the region made the issue of obedience towards authority seem exceptionally interesting to us.”

For those unfamiliar with the Milgram experiment, it tested people’s willingness to deliverer electric shocks to another person when encouraged by an experimenter. While no shocks were actually delivered in any of the experiments, the participants believed them to be real. The Milgram experiments demonstrated that under certain conditions of pressure from authority, people are willing to carry out commands even when it may harm someone else.

“Upon learning about Milgram’s experiments, a vast majority of people claim that ‘I would never behave in such a manner,’ says Tomasz Grzyb, a social psychologist involved in the research. “Our study has, yet again, illustrated the tremendous power of the situation the subjects are confronted with and how easily they can agree to things which they find unpleasant.”

While ethical considerations prevented a full replication of the experiments, researchers created a similar set-up with lower “shock” levels to test the level of obedience of participants.

The researchers recruited 80 participants (40 men and 40 women), with an age range from 18 to 69, for the study. Participants had up to 10 buttons to press, each a higher “shock” level. The results show that the level of participants’ obedience towards instructions is similarly high to that of the original Milgram studies.

They found that 90% of the people were willing to go to the highest level in the experiment. In terms of differences between peoples willingness to deliver shock to a man versus a woman, “It is worth remarking,” write the authors, “that although the number of people refusing to carry out the commands of the experimenter was three times greater when the student [the person receiving the "shock"] was a woman, the small sample size does not allow us to draw strong conclusions.”

In terms of how society has changed, Grzyb notes, “half a century after Milgram’s original research into obedience to authority, a striking majority of subjects are still willing to electrocute a helpless individual.”

The good news from a study last year: Matthew Hollander listened to all the Millgram recordings again, and there were about 800 in the full set. He found that even among obedient people there were signs of resistance as the experiment got more painful. They had ways of slowing the experiment, tried to talk their way out of it, and talk to the victim too. The difference was that the disobedient people were more aggressive about slowing things down, they started to resist earlier, and had more options to resist. It would seem likely that if we train people better, a lot more people will stand up to authority.

“Before examining these recordings, I [Hollander] was imagining some really aggressive ways of stopping the experiment — trying to open the door where the ‘learner’ is locked in, yelling at the experimenter, trying to leave,” Hollander says. “What I found was there are many ways to try to stop the experiment, but they’re less aggressive.”

Most often, stop tries involved some variation on, “I can’t do this anymore,” or “I won’t do this anymore,” and were employed by 98 percent of the disobedient Milgram subjects studied by Hollander. That’s compared to fewer than 20 percent of the obedient subjects.

Interestingly, all six of the resistive actions were put to use by obedient and disobedient participants.

“What this shows is that even those who were ultimately compliant or obedient had practices for resisting the invocation of the experimenter’s authority,” says Douglas Maynard, a UW-Madison sociology professor who leads the Garfinkel Laboratory for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. “It wasn’t like they automatically caved in. They really worked to counter what was coming at them. It wasn’t a blind kind of obedience.”

If people could be trained to tap practices for resistance like those outlined in Hollander’s analysis, they may be better equipped to stand up to an illegal, unethical or inappropriate order from a superior. And not just in extreme situations, according to Maynard.

Though the numbers do still look depressing. There are critics of the Millgram experiments, who say that it was an artificial setting, unethical, and people wouldn’t react that way, but this second round of research has replicated at least some of those findings.

There is a kind of Millgram experiment going on in climate science. The experimenters keep pushing more ridiculous buttons…

References:

Dariusz Doliński, Tomasz Grzyb, Michał Folwarczny, Patrycja Grzybała, Karolina Krzyszycha, Karolina Martynowska, Jakub Trojanowski. Would You Deliver an Electric Shock in 2015? Obedience in the Experimental Paradigm Developed by Stanley Milgram in the 50 Years Following the Original Studies. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2017; 194855061769306 DOI: 10.1177/1948550617693060

Matthew M. Hollander. The repertoire of resistance: Non-compliance with directives in Milgram’s ‘obedience’ experiments. British Journal of Social Psychology, 2015; DOI: 10.1111/bjso.12099

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103 comments to Infamous Milgram experiments repeated: Only a few will stand up against authority

There have been variants, which I remember dimly 50 years after being introduced to Stanley’s nastiness, where the groups are exposed to various kinds of persuasion & leadership to not inflict the shocks before the experiment. I’d suggest these courses might be more interesting in a ‘persuasive media’ world than mere repetition.
Milgram’s basic work has stood as well as Pavlov’s – but pure operant conditioning doesn’t involve the experimenter’s authority, active or implicit.

I sy this noting that draconion energy rules against fossil fuels inflict pain on third world places hoping to develop, yet there are those who both advocate development yet gladly inflict the pain (both only proposed). I’m not sure the mechanism is the same, but it might be…? AS I say, I’ve not studied in many years, so there may be research that goes beyond merely calling this cognitive dissonance.

You don’t need to be trained through modern education. Modern life does a better and more thorough job. We have had over two hundred years of accepting, believing and being educated in the evils of modern economic dogma so we have been well trained to hurt anyone whom we are told to by any figure of authority. Superbly trained.

So why should this come as any surprise? We currently live in a world where the economic dogma and the execution of that dogma surrounds us and includes us in a continuous Milgram Experiment every day of our lives. The pain may not be inflicted by electric shock but is by economic shock and dislocation. The big land owners throughout history have been particularly vicious.

Don’t believe me? Think about the “crime of being poor,” the nineteenth century Poor House (UK) as one example, the Luddites getting such a bad press (and their persection) when they fought for Living Wages for weavers are another example. The attitude of the modern governments to those who are unable to find work has not advanced very far even in these supposedly enlightened times, and I speak from personal experience.

I own copies of and have thoroughly read the following books. I can highly recommend them:

Miller, George, 2000 On Fairness and Efficiency, The Privatisation of the Public Income of the Last Millenium” The Policy Press, ISBN 1-86134-221-7
(Dr Miller was the Professor of Epidemiology at the a researcher at the London School of Medicine. The book is the result of his research into why, in this day and age of increasing lifespan, it is only for some. Others have a reducing lifespan. Miller doesn’t spare the details.)

George, Henry, 1883 Social Problems Robert Schalkenbach Foundation. Read online. The US also had and has its own cruelties.

All three books are available from the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, a charitable organisation. Prices are USD. Miller’s and Harrison’s books I have also found on Amazon.co.uk both new and second-hand.

Welcome to the Real World of the on-going and Continous Milgram Experiment.

The line:
Dr Miller was the Professor of Epidemiology at the a researcher at the London School of Medicine.
should be:
Dr Miller was the Professor of Epidemiology and a member of the Research Council at the London School of Medicine.

Of course the citizens of SA are safe from such experiments.
Attempting to shocking the (actor) victim with electricity has to carry an additional randomize factor that ruins the experiment’s (statistical) outcome.

Of course this leads to the conclusion that the good citizen of SA are immune from the Milgram effect, or at least that is what these citizens believe the local authority has led them to understand.

What an absolute pile of steaming excrement. During WW2, the japs frequently and enthusiastically got stuck into murdering civilians and unarmed prisoners. Why? Because we’re not all the same and you can’t trust your he vast majority of foreigners because they come from cultures where selfishness and lack of empathy are the norm.

They were only under orders Craig. Under orders was for those the Japaneses soldiers perceived to be from a much higher authority. And that could be viewed as not so dissimilar from the Craig Thomas’s of this world who surrendering rational thought to the authority of UN-IPCC crowd?

It has more to do with groupthink and respect for authority than lack of intelligence. Academics in other fields, bright people no doubt, but they accept the paradigm on climate change because they are ignorant of the science.

Journalists and politicians fall into the same category as ordinary folk, compliant and accepting.

With this electric shock experiment, I wonder if they failed to press the button to deliver the shock, whether if they were shocked instead, would they be so hesitant?
The supposedly good “Nazi” Albert Speers noted that in WW2, communications at a distance didnt allow questioning and it was used to commit atrocities, as orders came from “higher up”. That distanced those who might question authority. The same thing going on today with the unquestioned global warming science by some who cannot think for themselves…..

We saw the movie about Milgram’s tests called Experimenter last year, Milgram was influenced by the events of the Holocaust, especially the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in developing the experiment.

He initially wanted to do the tests in Germany to gather data on its population regarding the willingness of people to commit terrible acts versus their nationality, after conducting trials in the USA he was stunned to have found what he was looking for in his own country.

OT , I see the great barrier reefs bleaching damage is so bad its unrecoverable , according to their ABC .
I have a new name for renewables , PARSITIC , yes it’s a parasite , needs to feed of another to survive or exist and this describes wind and battery power to a tee .

As usual people will queue up behind someone who appears to have authority, whatever the matter and whatever the authority and then follow like good little automatons, relieved no end to be free of the responsibility to think for themselves. Or is that an unfair characterization of the way people behave? Probably not. But you be the judge. I don’t want the responsibility to think for myself either.

Have you really a million friends? But no matter. In my brief career as a proud Facebook account owner one thing about Facebook has become obvious, Facebook tends to encourage trivial level discourse. But I will readily admit that some engage in more serious examination of events and their meaning. Nevertheless, if your million Facebook friends tend toward the average it’s very hard to agree that they prove anything.

Another interesting feature of inbuilt human behavior is the birth order effect.

There was a book that I read almost 20 years ago that looked at the French Revolution from the perspective of birth order in families. Using examples from this very difficult part of history, the study showed that first borns tended to wind up on a different side of the mess to their siblings.

Numerous family splits were illustrated and the conclusions drawn to suggest that how we will react in situations can be a function of early conditioning.

People too easily accept the expert opinion, because there are many experts on who we rely. For instance a family doctor, or a surveyor, or a lawyer. But all these have professional qualifications in a proven body of knowledge, and ethical principles that they have promised to adhere to. The climate alarmists have no demonstrable body of knowledge, nor any proven competencies. In fact, in short-term predictions that would suggest emerging climate cataclysm the climate community have had zero success.

Empty vessels make the most noise that cons gullible people to believe in anything. For example if enough of them make noises often enough that the earth is flat guess what will happen. A lot more people will believe it and the Flat Earth Society will become very popular. The lack of critical thinking is mostly due to the way kids are taught at school.

I and my siblings were mostly life-long, left wing Democrats until responses to the 2009 release of ClimateGate emails revealed to one of us an unholy alliance of the Democratic Party with “97% consensus science.”

In the blind tests we assume that the appointed experts in lab coats are real. But in the world of climate, there is no clear distinction between a genuine expert leader in the field and a proclaimed know-all who has can repeat a few formulas and spout a lot of nonsense. But, in the real world, when adopting wide-ranging and extremely costly policies on the basis of claimed experts, should not be policy-makers have a duty of care to the people they serve in treating the climatologists like expert witnesses? This from the Business Dictionary might provide a guide.

Admissible testimony relating to a professional, scientific, or technical subject. Expert evidence is based on formal and/or special study, training, or experience that imparts the competency to form an opinion upon matters associated with that subject. It is the duty of the authoritative expert to present the necessary scientific/technical criteria to enable a court to test the accuracy of its own conclusions and to form its own independent judgment of the evidence. Before given the permission to state their opinion, the ‘experts’ are usually questioned by the court to evaluate their qualifications and experience in the subject.

Proper application of this criteria would mean that the next IPCC report would have to be abandoned.

Trumble could really set the cat among the pigeons if he also brought the below Gordon dam project to the fore.
Cancelled by the greenies and old leftie Hawke with the help of the RAAF, it could theoretically help to offset the loss of Hazelwood.
That of course is making a lot of assumptions about Hydro Tasmania’s water, but assuming a future loss of industry on the Apple Isle, a constant 500MW across the ditch might be conceivable.
(The assumption I am making of course, is the with the demise of Hazelwood the wholesale price will undoubtedly rise in Tassie as well, quite possibly forcing South 32 and Rio to say adios. A big call I know, but probably more realistic that many expect.)
Of course there is no justification for the cost of this sort of reaction. Far less expensive to leave Hazelwood be, or even to build a coal fired facility in the Fingal Valley.
However the inmates running the asylum have no understanding of the time value of money.

There were provisions made for extensions to the Snowy Mountains hydro electricity scheme and these can be seen driving around the tourist roads. Of course extension is a good plan however, our great leader also commented …

“The unprecedented expansion will help make renewables reliable, filling in holes caused by intermittent supply and generator outages.

“It will enable greater energy efficiency and help stabilise electricity supply into the future.”

This is interesting, taken from the Snowy Mountains Authority website;

In 2012, Snowy Hydro in conjunction with Essential Energy decided that a redundant substation above Lake Jindabyne was to be decommissioned. Snowy Hydro undertook an environmental assessment of the proposed decommissioning works and worked with the Kosciuszko National Parks officers to ensure the removal would be carried out to the highest standards.
Snowy Hydro was required to undertake a contamination assessment of the site and prepare a validation report at completion of the works to verify the site posed no ongoing environmental risk. Another requirement was that the site be rehabilitated and re-vegetated after the decommissioning so that in time it blends in
with the surrounding National Park and provides similar habitat. This work was finalised in June 2015 and all requirements were met.
Looking forward, the removal of the substation and associated infrastructure including oil filled transformers has reduced the environmental risks that were posed by the site. The re-vegetation of the site has already provided a much improved natural outlook and this will continue to improve over time.

For those who don’t understand Australian politics, groupthink is not such a bad thing when its going your way.

The PM chose Josh Frydenberg to be the environment minister because he is an empty space when it comes to climate change. In December he tried to organise an inquiry ostensibly to eliminate Abbott’s Direct Action and replace it with a punitive tax, but there was a backbench revolt and he had to back down.

The government is suffering from cognitive dissonance and looking vulnerable.

If government + establishment wanted to make us believe in on-going alien presence and contact in Antarctica, they could do it.

It would begin with admitted uncertainty and the need for open debate. Certainty would mount and the time for debate would be declared over.

Evidence could be some jerky actual footage or cheesy CGI, many concurring “scientists” and verification by very reliable sources. Dismissing demands for hard, close-up evidence could be justified under security measures. The media and academia would cooperate, Stephen Hawking, Pope Francis and Elon Musk would make enthusiastic pronouncements, someone would get a Nobel Peace Prize, various budgets of many billions would be allocated, schools would have Visitor (not alien!) Day, dissent would be tolerated with great charity but also with sorrow, the attendees of the Oscars and Golden Globes would wear pro-alien ribbons, prominent youtube dissenters would turn out to be flat earthers or have far more extravagant views on aliens…

Its a Hollywood blockbuster with ‘deep state’ overtones, quite believable.

I cannot confirm or deny the rumour of an alien base in Antarctica, but I’m confident they are aware that ENSO is the main driver of temperatures and climate on the planet. Hopefully they will enlighten us on the mechanism.

14 Mar: NEA (National Education Assocn) Today: 5 Ways to Teach About Climate Change in Your Classroom
By Mary Ellen Flannery
Here’s a fact: In 2016, Earth reached its highest temperature on record, trouncing the record set just a year earlier in 2015, which beat the previous record set in 2014. Our planet is warming, and its temperatures are fast heading toward levels that scientists believe will threaten humans and the natural world…
2. Use Data
Climate change may be a political hot potato in some communities. (President Donald Trump called it a Chinese-made hoax a few years ago.) But the data is indisputable. “There’s really no pushback from students or parents,” says Peter Johnson, an eighth-grade science teacher in rural, conservative Minnesota, “because the measurements speak for themselves.”…ETC

What do the Experts (Your Colleagues) Recommend?
Websites:
New Jersey’s Taterka recommends sticking with proven, peer-reviewed scientific resources.
At the top of his list is NOAA…
Equally fantastic are the resources provided by NASA…
Also worth checking out are the National Center for Science Education, the National Science Teachers Association, and one of Macke’s favorites: the CLEAN (Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness) Network…
Videos:
Maryland’s Kiarpos opts for “Climate Change 101 with Bill Nye” for an easily understood, 4-minute film…
New York’s Bartholomew says her students were deeply motivated by Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2016 95-minute documentary, “Before the Flood”…you can watch it free here (LINK)…
Games and Activities:
“How big is your carbon footprint?” (LINK)http://neatoday.org/2017/03/14/teaching-about-climate-change/

Wikipedia: The National Education Association (NEA) is the largest labor union in the United States. It represents public school teachers and other support personnel, faculty and staffers at colleges and universities, retired educators, and college students preparing to become teachers. The NEA has just under 3 million members and is headquartered in Washington, D.C. The NEA had a budget of more than $341 million for the 2012–2013 fiscal year…
The NEA, originally on the conservative side of U.S. politics, by the 1970s emerged as a factor in modern liberalism. While the NEA has a stated position of “non-partisan”, it typically supports the Democratic Party…
From 1989 through the 2014 election cycle, the NEA spent over $92 million on political campaign contributions, 97% of which went to Democrats…
In October 2015, the NEA endorsed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid. Clinton accepted the endorsement in person…

you name it: CAGW caused it.
most vulnerable to CAGW health effects: children, student athletes, pregnant women, the elderly, low-income families, and people with chronic illnesses…

lengthy.

15 Mar: CBS: Doctors join forces, warn climate change is harming our health
By Mary Brophy Marcus
Climate change isn’t just happening in the Arctic Circle and Antarctica where more ice is melting year after year. Its impact is being felt right here at home, and it’s posing a threat to the health of millions of Americans, say doctors representing 11 top U.S. medical societies. They are joining forces in Washington, D.C., today to speak out about the health risks posed by climate change.
They announced the formation of a new organization, the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health — made up of family physicians, pediatricians, obstetricians, allergists, internists and other medical experts — and are meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill to discuss their concerns. More than half of all U.S. doctors are members of one of the participating groups, which include the American College of Physicians and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
They’ll also present a new report, “Medical Alert! Climate Change is Harming Our Health,” which includes scientific evidence and accounts from doctors who see climate change exacerbating a wide range of health issues, including…ETC ETC

“More than 97 percent of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening,” the report states.
“It’s not only hurting polar bears, it’s hurting us,” said Dr. Mona Sarfaty, the director of the new consortium and a professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. She is also director of the Center for Climate Change Communication there…
But Sarfaty noted it’s challenging to get this message through to many people because they feel fine…http://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-change-global-warming-harming-health-11-doctors-groups/

Here is a paper these folks have put out on health hazards of climate change.http://medsocietiesforclimatehealth.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/medical_alert.pdf
This is scary stuff as they use Cooks 97% to argue from authority that dangerous climate change is a fact and their doctors need to address it with patients and in their diagnoses. Their “facts” come right out of WWF propaganda and they claim membership of over half of US doctors.
I have no idea what to do about it but I see this as dangerous misinformation being disseminated by a very trusted group.
I wonder if Doctors for Disaster Preparedness are aware of this-they seem to be pretty well grounded in facts and common sense during the videos of presentations to them by skeptics.

14 Mar: ProPublica: Andrew Revkin: Trump’s Defense Secretary Cites Climate Change as National Security Challenge
James Mattis’ unpublished testimony before a Senate panel recognizes a threat others in the administration reject or minimize..
In unpublished written testimony provided to the Senate Armed Services Committee after his confirmation hearing in January, Mattis said it was incumbent on the U.S. military to consider how changes like open-water routes in the thawing Arctic and drought in global trouble spots can pose challenges for troops and defense planners. He also stressed this is a real-time issue, not some distant what-if.

“Climate change is impacting stability in areas of the world where our troops are operating today,” Mattis said in written answers to questions posed after the public hearing by Democratic members of the committee. “It is appropriate for the Combatant Commands to incorporate drivers of instability that impact the security environment in their areas into their planning.”
Mattis has long espoused the position that the armed forces, for a host of reasons, need to cut dependence on fossil fuels and explore renewable energy where it makes sense. He had also, as commander of the U.S. Joint Forces Command in 2010, signed off on the Joint Operating Environment, which lists climate change as one of the security threats the military expected to confront over the next 25 years…
Mattis’ position also would appear to clash with some Trump administration budget plans…

In September, acting on the basis of a National Intelligence Council report he commissioned, President Obama ordered more than a dozen federal agencies and offices, including the Defense Department, “to ensure that climate change-related impacts are fully considered in the development of national security doctrine, policies, and plans.”
A related “action plan” was issued on Dec. 23, requiring those agencies to create a Climate and National Security Working Group within 60 days, and for relevant agencies to create “implementation plans” in that same period.
There’s no sign that any of this has been done…

15 Mar: Bloomberg: Christopher Flavelle: To Protect Climate Money, Obama Stashed It Where It’s Hard to Find
President Donald Trump will find the job of reining in spending on climate initiatives made harder by an Obama-era policy of dispersing billions of dollars in programs across dozens of agencies — in part so they couldn’t easily be cut.
There is no single list of those programs or their cost, because President Barack Obama sought to integrate climate programs into everything the federal government did.

The goal was to get all agencies to take climate into account, and also make those programs hard to disentangle, according to former members of the administration. In some cases, the idea was to make climate programs hard for Republicans in Congress to even find.
“Much of the effort in the Obama administration was to mainstream climate change,” said Jesse Keenan, who worked on climate issues with the Department of Housing and Urban Development and now teaches at Harvard University. He said all federal agencies were required to incorporate climate-change plans into their operations…

The Obama administration’s approach will be tested by Trump’s first budget request to Congress, an outline of which is due to be released Thursday. Trump has called climate change a hoax; last November he promised to save $100 billion over eight years by cutting all federal climate spending.
His budget will offer an early indication of the seriousness of that pledge — and whether his administration is able to identify programs that may have intentionally been called anything but climate-related…

The last time the Congressional Research Service estimated total federal spending on climate was in 2013. It concluded 18 agencies had climate-related activities, and calculated $77 billion in spending from fiscal 2008 through 2013 alone.
But that figure could well be too low. The Obama administration didn’t always include “climate” in program names, said Alice Hill, director for resilience policy on Obama’s National Security Council…
The range of climate programs is vast, stretching across the entire government…

The budget for NASA’s Earth Science program increased 50 percent, to $1.8 billion. Funding for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which is mandated by Congress to report every four years on the state of climate change, rose 45 percent to $2.6 billion. At the National Science Foundation, the geosciences program almost doubled to $1.3 billion…
Any cuts may face opposition in Congress, as Democrats and some Republicans support the spending, especially that to help communities withstand floods, hurricanes or droughts associated with climate change. Wednesday, a group of 17 Republicans announced their support for climate science — and policy measures to address it…

“The Trump Administration needs to defund the entire apparatus of the climate change federal funding gravy train,” said Marc Morano, a former Republican staffer for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. “In order to dismantle the climate establishment, agencies and programs throughout the federal government need to be targeted.”…
“The climate funding has spread to almost every aspect of the federal government with sometimes wacky results,” said Morano, who doubts global warming and runs the website climatedepot.com. He cited one example of a Department of Transportation query about the link between climate change and fatal car crashes.

Others argue that the spread of climate programs throughout the federal government simply reflects the evolving nature of the risk.
“It is irresponsible not to examine the possibilities and understand our sensitivity to them,” said Ed Link, a former director of research and development for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who led the forensic analysis of Hurricane Katrina’s effect on New Orleans. If federal agencies stop doing that work, he said by email, “shame on them.”https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-03-15/cutting-climate-spending-made-harder-by-obama-s-budget-tactics

Now you won’t see that in the SMH or the Age or on the ABC. Having been to the area, the Sahara (Arab for desert) makes Australia seem temperate. The heat is incredible, coupled with the total lack of water or humidity. You need to continually drink water. So I would have thought 2 meters of snow was newsworthy.

looks like the abc reported it weeks before the Sun did because the sun needs nice photos. Yes you linked to a 2 month old news item that was about an event that happened weeks earlier but here is an item that was published as it was happening

and while you are spreading fake facts, any denial of the ABC being the first radio news to headline the blizzards in NE USA days before they occurred? ie they were reporting the forward alerts at the head of the news.

The Dec event was a good dusting, Jan 2017 snow was heavy, as shown in TdeF’s link. Maybe the ABC reported on that also…but since I’ve stopped watching, hearing or reading the trashy ABC, I couldn’t say. (I’ve also flushed the trashy commercial networks out of my life. Feels wonderful.)

One thing that doesn’t seem to be considered in these experiments is people’s innate desire to control others.
When the opportunity exists, and a convenient excusing rationale exists, most people will do their worst.
The excuse of “obeying authority” is just that: a convenient excuse.
Look at any political demonstration. The “fact” that many demonstrators just want to wreak havoc is buried under their excuse that their opponents are “evil”.
So a authority figure, or a “higher morality” provide the excuse for people to do what they want to do.

It is interesting I suppose, in a psychological sort of fashion, to observe trolls madly commenting on an old thread.
They seem to enjoy muttering away to themselves. It must make them feel important.
There is some numbskull doing precisely that at the moment on the last thread.

Interesting psychology, and an interesting commentary on the medium, that an old thread is 48 hours old from inception. What if someone just stumbled on it after 5 days, noted that it was only a third of the way down the recent threads, and had some insight to add. They’d be ignored because the readers of the blog either don’t deign to read old threads or their limited attention span means that they would not be able to cope.

I have just watched the Freydenburg interview interrupted by Weatherdill.
It is a pity that Jay Weatherdill and Penny Rong split up – they are made for each other.
As thick as 5 or 6 planks.
He is upset that people are trashing SA.
He is the one who has trashed SA.

Even the ABC is a little less than enthusiastic. Comment heard as I drove along the lines that Weatherdill has done this regularly and generally does well out of “Us v nasty Canberra-ites”. Mentioned that the election was due in exactly 12 months (How long Oh Lord). In any other commentator I would say ‘distinct signs of scepticism’.

14 Mar: Boston Globe: Jeff Jacoby: Why are climate-change models so flawed? Because climate science is so incomplete
‘Do you believe,” CNBC’s Joe Kernen asked Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency’s new director, in an interview last Thursday, “that it’s been proven that CO2 is the primary control knob for climate?”
Replied Pruitt: “No. I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact. So no — I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet. We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.” …

11 Mar: Judith Curry: Scott Pruitt’s statement on climate change
Listen to what Scott Pruitt actually said on CNBC and then compare it to the portrayal in the media…
Can you square what Pruitt actually said with the distorted quotes and headlines about this? I can’t.
I think that these two statements made by Pruitt are absolutely correct…

The most interest reaction to all this is David Robert’s vox article:

“The right’s refusal to accept the authority of climate science is of a piece with its rejection of mainstream media, academia, and government, the shared institutions and norms that bind us together and contain our political disputes.
“The ‘problem’: a change of administration and party after 8 years, mainstream media no longer has a lock on the media’s message (given all of the new news sources on the internet), academia’s profoundly liberal bias is being challenged, and the consensus that has been negotiated and enforced by certain elite scientists is being challenged.”

After the fall of the Soveit Union in 1990, I travelled back to my parent’s home country to meet with family that I had never met before. I have a cousin there, only a few months older than me, so we had interesting discussions about our parallel lives. At one point, he reprimanded me as being too critical of a particular action that he had taken. He claimed, quite rightly, that growing up and living in Australia I was not exposed to the harsh realities of supporting oneself and one’s family under a harsh political regime, and had no right to preach from the moral high ground, not having been exposed to those realities myself.
Similar to the Milgram experiment described above, there have been other experiments to determine how ‘moral’ people are in certain situations, when there is no one to observe and report any amoral behavior. As I recall, the majority of persons acted ‘morally’ if there was a risk of getting caught and shamed if they behave otherwise.
In ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’, T. E. Lawrence describes how easily a civilized Oxford educated person can lose his ‘thin veneer of civilization’ and gleefully participate in a killing frenzy.
So it may be that most of us really do not have a clue how we would behave under different circumstances until actually put to the test.

Very insightful.
It reminds me of the crimes for which the Irish were sentenced to ‘transportation’ to Van Diemens’ Land.
Starving people arrested for theft of a potatoe, and sent off on a dangerous voyage.
Yet the aristocracy were scared sh*tless after the French Revolution.
How would you or I behave if we had been in Ireland in the early 19th century? What would you or I do if we were a magistrate in that era?

14 Mar: LifeSiteNews: Claire Chretien: Pro-abortion speaker at Vatican conference: Pope has ‘done more’ for global warming movement than anyone
The father of the population control movement, Paul Ehrlich, told a Vatican conference that he thinks Pope Francis is “the person in the world [who] has done more” than others to “initiate work” to fight climate change.
Ehrlich was a speaker at the Biological Extinction conference, sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences…
However, speaking at the Vatican on February 27, Ehrlich praised the current pontiff.
“I’m pleased to say that one of the best statements on the ethical issues [of environmentalism] came from Pope Francis. If I can quote from Laudato Si’ … ‘Each year sees the disappearance of thousands of plant and animal species which we will never know, which our children will never see, because they have been lost forever. The great majority become extinct for reasons related to human activity. Because of us, thousands of species will no longer give glory to God by their very existence nor convey their message to us. We have no such right,’” said Ehrlich. “And I would say, ‘Amen.’”

Later in his talk, Ehrlich said, “We have been overusing the atmosphere as a sink for greenhouse gases. And there, I have to say, the person in the world has done more to initiate work to get it changed has been Pope Francis. It’s one of the biggest threats [that] humanity faces and I think his coming out on it was maybe the most important single thing that anybody has done so far to move in the right direction on climate change.”
The person who “has probably done more on the other side than any human being” is Rex Tillerson, America’s new Secretary of State, Ehrlich said…

8 Mar: Breitbart: Italian Archbishop Suggests Pope Benedict XVI Resigned Under Obama ‘Pressure’
by Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D
An Italian archbishop close to Pope Benedict XVI has claimed that the Obama administration may have been complicit in the “tremendous pressures” that led the former pope to resign in 2013.
It is “no coincidence” that some Catholic groups “have asked President Trump to open a commission of inquiry to investigate whether the administration of Barack Obama exerted pressure on Benedict,” said Archbishop Luigi Negri in an interview (LINK) Monday, citing other revelations by Wikileaks regarding efforts by the Democratic Party to sway the direction of the Catholic Church in the United States…

The archbishop was making reference to a letter written by a group of American Catholics to President Trump last January requesting that the administration conduct an investigation into a possible Soros-Obama-Clinton conspiracy behind the resignation of Pope Benedict.
The letter stated specifically that “we have reason to believe that a Vatican ‘regime change’ was engineered by the Obama administration.”…
In startling revelations (LINK) last October, Clinton campaign chief John Podesta was found to have created phony “Catholic” organizations in order to use Church leaders to push a liberal agenda in congress and to promote the agenda of the Democratic Party…http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2017/03/08/italian-archbishop-suggests-pope-benedict-xvi-resigned-obama-pressures/

15 Mar: WaPo: Jason Samenow: Weather Service made poor decision in overplaying Nor’easter snow predictions
This was a well-intentioned but flawed decision that has the potential to damage public trust in weather forecasts…
Politicians and thought leaders pounced. “I don’t know how much we should be paying these weather guys,” said New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R). “I’ve had my fill of the National Weather Service after seven and a half years, to tell you the truth.”…
The influential media aggregator Matt Drudge tweeted, “What is going on with National Weather Service? Lots of misses piling up.” He added: “Overreaction by govts, bad forecasting … very troubling trend.”…

Even before the storm hit, President Trump expressed skepticism about the forecast and was proved right, at least in Washington, Philadelphia and New York. “Let’s hope it’s not going to be as bad as some people are predicting,” Trump said. “Usually it isn’t.”…

15 Mar: Reuters: Emily Flitter: Exclusive: U.S. group Sierra Club seeks probe of EPA’s Pruitt over CO2 comments
U.S. environmental group the Sierra Club has asked the Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general to investigate whether the agency’s head, Scott Pruitt, violated internal policies when he said he did not believe carbon dioxide was a major contributor to climate change, according to a letter seen by Reuters on Wednesday.
Lawyers for the Sierra Club wrote to the EPA’s Office of Inspector General on Tuesday asking the independent watchdog to check whether Pruitt violated the EPA’s 2012 Scientific Integrity Policy when he told a CNBC interviewer on March 9, “I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.”…

“It’s pretty unprecedented to have the head of the EPA contradicting basic scientific facts,” Sierra Club Senior Attorney Elena Saxonhouse told Reuters on Wednesday.
In the letter, the Sierra Club’s lawyers said Pruitt’s comments contradicted a “comprehensive review” of scientific research on climate change and appeared to be politically motivated…

“Administrator Pruitt’s comments are perfectly in keeping with the scientific integrity policy,” EPA spokesman John Konkus said in an email. “There is an ongoing scientific debate on climate change, its causes and its effect. That debate should be encouraged as the Administrator has done, not discouraged as Sierra Club is attempting to do.”…http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climatechange-epa-exclusive-idUSKBN16M2O7

expect lawyers to get involved at every turn – no expense will be spared:

Trump’s review of car fuel standards could lead to fight with California, environmentalists
Washington Post – ‎9 hours ago‎
President Trump opened the door Wednesday to rolling back fuel efficiency standards that were adopted during the Obama administration, a move that could lead to a legal fight with state regulators and environmental groups in the coming years

Wikipedia: Derrick Watson
Derrick Kahala Watson is a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Hawaii…
He received his Juris Doctor in 1991 from Harvard Law School, graduating the same year as President Obama…
On November 14, 2012, President Obama nominated Watson to serve as a United States District Judge for the United States District Court for the District of Hawaii…
On March 15, 2017, he granted a temporary restraining order blocking President Trump’s revised executive order banning entry of designated groups into the United States as violative of the First Amendment’s establishment clause…

Those who refuse to stand up to evil authority risk finding themselves on the wrong side of a trial at Nuremberg declaring, “I was just following orders.”

What scares me far more than the outcome of Milgram’s experiment was the outcome at Jonestown – but then that was no “experiment”.

There sure are a lot of dots to connect between Milgram’s experimment, Jim Jones, Islamist suicide bombers, Lysenkoism, the radical left and the “climate movement”. At this point I just want to throw all those dots on the floor at Delphi and let someone else finish drawing the picture, maybe they’ll come up with a better one than what I’m seeing.

The author of the linked piece returned to the original data, recordings etc.. from Milligan’s experiment. While not quite ‘junk’ science, it was pretty close.

“The slavish obedience to authority we have come to associate with Milgram’s experiments comes to sound much more like bullying and coercion when you listen to these recordings.”

“Milgram himself was privately aware of the methodological weakness of his research and struggled with many of the issues about the validity of experiments and their generalisability beyond the lab. Privately Milgram reflected that his work was more art than science, and described himself as a “hopeful poet.”

Poet or scientist, his determination to make a contribution to an understanding of one of the pressing issues of his generation led him to frame, shape and edit the story of his research for maximum impact. And while Milgram may have not measured obedience to authority in his lab his findings do offer us a powerful lesson: to question the authority of science and to be more critical of the stories we’ve been told.”

Perhaps there was coercion and bullying, was it really that different to what occurs in parts through society today? It is still chilling that people responded to coercion knowing that they were doing an experiment (even if they didn’t understand what the experiment really was).

While the context of this experiment may be a little unreal, it is still a good thought provoker.

The very act of administering electric shocks was seen differently when this experiment was conducted, most people would have carried an image of the “electric chair” and so affected the approach taken by each of the subjects.

My wife reported a test she undertook as a uni student. A group was asked to determine the longest of a set of lines. Unknown to my wife, EVERYONE except her was a tester, and they insisted that her (correct) choice was wrong. When she resisted, arguments were made to convince her. The main point was to test the effect of peer pressure – and my wife is as obstinate as I am!
So, maybe it’s only the obstinate skeptics such as us readers who can resist the “Sky is falling!” narrative!